Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–1975 by Natalia Telepneva

Abstract

dimension of U.S. global hegemony and political ambitions in the context of the Cold War, as Nicolas Dirks and I recently explained in The Cambridge History of America and the World, vol. 4 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Still, the authors are right to point out that the significance of U.S.-led or sponsored work often changed when it moved across national borders and into dialogue with local political and social scientific research contexts. Many U.S. social scientists were themselves well aware of this, often producing their work in partnership with local social scientists who were not just passive recipients of American social science but would instead actively shape the thinking of their U.S. partners—as was the case with the anthropologist Charles Wagley, who collaborated closely with Brazilian colleagues in developing his ideas (as Sebastian Gil-Riaño’s contribution suggests). Conversely, ideas that emerged out of a disciplinary or local political context that might have little per se to do with the Cold War could, upon traveling across borders, become enrolled in Cold War disputes, as was the case with dependency theory, which began as a debate within the Latin American left over industrialization strategies, but which upon arrival in the United States was deployed primarily as a counter–Cold War social scientific critique of modernization theory (as Margarita Fajardo’s contribution explains). A particular strength of the volume is its clear focus on the importance of UNESCO as an early Cold War–era institution for promoting social scientific inquiry worldwide. Several essays in the volume mention UNESCO’s role as a vehicle for funding the production and transmission of social scientific knowledge, but Per Wisselgren’s piece in particular highlights how the vision of social science promoted by UNESCO during its first decade was in fact at odds with the kind of social science that became hegemonic in the American academy during the 1950s and 1960s. Under the leadership of Alva Myrdal, UNESCO’s Social Science Department promoted methods and forms of social science whose normative baseline was not the promotion of liberal democratic capitalism but the development of world government, international peace, and “One Worldism.” An intriguing question left by this volume is how global social science might have unfolded differently had UNESCO rather than U.S. government-aligned visions of social science become the globally hegemonic ones in the second half of the twentieth century.